Christopher P. Blocker

The Role of the Sales Force in Value Creation and Appropriation: New Directions for Research

Recent research in marketing strategy emphasizes the dual processes of creating and appropriating value in exchange relationships. In business to-business markets, salespeople have unique opportunities to translate customers’ desired value back into their firms as well as understand and influence how the value that has been cocreated can be fairly appropriated in the form of revenue and other strategic benefits. Yet surprisingly little research examines the role of the sales force, compared to overall firm strategies, for shaping these key processes. Against this background, this paper offers an integrative framework that delineates how the sales force creates, sustains, and appropriates value in buyer -seller relationships. The framework integrates relevant theories and paradigms from a variety of disciplines and elaborates on a set of boundary conditions (e.g., relationship life cycle and globalization) that influence the role of the sales force in value creation and appropriation. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities that provide fertile areas for future research in the area.

Organizational Capacity for Change and Strategic Ambidexterity: Flying the Plane While Rewiring It

Purpose – Successful firms must exploit existing markets while simultaneously exploring new market opportunities. However, skills required to do both simultaneously are often at odds with each other. To reconcile this dilemma, the authors aim to discuss the new concept of “strategic ambidexterity,” which is conceptualized as the ability to simultaneously pursue exploitation and exploratory strategies in ways that lead to enhanced organizational effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conceptually integrate literature from organizational theory, strategic management, and marketing to yield three new theoretical propositions.Findings – It is argued that a relatively new dynamic capability, organizational capacity for change, is the primary antecedent of strategic ambidexterity and that this relationship is moderated by environmental uncertainty and organizational slack.Originality/value – Most organizational and marketing theories rely on linear assumptions and models. However, twenty-first century organizations must reconcile competitive realities that are often nonlinear in nature. This study provides a conceptual framework which transcends traditional thinking, and provides a comprehensive yet concise framework for researching this new competitive reality further.

The Transformative Value of a Service Experience

The pursuit of upward social transformation through service design and practice demands rigorous thinking about what this kind of change looks like and how it comes about. To advance these two goals, this study conceptualizes transformative value, defined as a social dimension of value creation which illuminates uplifting changes among individuals and collectives in the marketplace. Conceptual development draws on structuration theory and the service-dominant logic to articulate the spheres of transformative value as well as four distinctions between habitual and transformative value. Ethnographic analysis with a nonprofit service, which focuses on mitigating the inequalities of poverty, explores how service providers can facilitate transformative value. Findings highlight the roles of holistic value propositions, an anti-structural servicescape, and communal service practices. Beyond micro-level social impact, findings also reveal the macro-level reach of transformative value by demonstrating how services can contest and transform dominant social structures and stimulate social action. Discussion highlights the implications of transformative value for human agency and ways to design services that promote well-being among vulnerable populations.

Unpacking What a “Relationship” Means to Commercial Buyers: How the Relationship Metaphor Creates Tension and Obscures Experience

Scholars apply the relationship metaphor as a default conceptual lens to understand commercial interactions. Yet whereas the relationship paradigm sheds light on how the socially embedded structure of these interactions impacts their outcomes, the relationship metaphor can also obscure scholarly understanding of business buyers’ experiences. Results of an interpretive study drawing on depth interviews demonstrate that buyers’ colloquial use of “relationship” language is ubiquitous. However, buyers’ narratives reveal instrumentally saturated emic meanings and felt tensions for the notion of expressive relationships with suppliers, which manifest deep conceptual friction with the constellation of etic relationship properties and constructs used by scholars to explain business interactions. Using Bauman’s sociological commentary on liquid modernity, analyses indicate that framing these interactions as “connections” is a more theoretically congruent lens for viewing buyers’ experiences. Implications for understanding buyers’ desire for relational bonds and recasting ironic “dark side” research findings offer challenges for relationship marketing research.

Exploring the dynamics of customer value in cross‐cultural business relationships

Purpose – A recent development in customer value research is building theory that can help the field go beyond understanding what customers currently value to exploring how customers’ perceptions of value change. This paper seeks to extend this emerging theory of customer value change to a global context by conceptually exploring the role of national culture as a key moderator of this phenomenon.Design/methodology/approach – The literature examining the role of national culture in business is reviewed for insights pertaining to buyers’ tendencies for change in general and for clues suggesting how customers’ embedded values in various cultural contexts might undergo value change in systematically different ways. Specifically, this paper employs Hofstede’s cultural framework to explore how the lens of national culture might influence the value change process.Findings – Based on this integrative review, several links between the cultural dimensions in Hofstede’s framework and value change theory are found to be supported by the literature. These connections suggest a moderating role for national culture, given the tendency for cultural factors to shape buyers’ interpretation of environmental change drivers and their resulting feelings of tension which research shows are closely associated with customers’ desired value changes from suppliers.Originality/value – This paper offers several theoretical propositions and conceptual models for future empirical validation. These new insights into an emerging theory of customer value change can provide the building-blocks for a number of future research directions designed to help managers exercise strategic foresight for changing global markets.

Polychronicity and Scheduling’s Role in Reducing Role Stress and Enhancing Sales Performance

Organizations can pursue a competitive advantage by guarding and enhancing one of its most precious marketplace assets—the sales force. Hiring salespeople who are suited for their role is critical within an increasingly global and competitive environment, and doing so generates dividends for increasing sales force retention, sales productivity, and performance. In addition to effective recruiting, reducing role stress is one way to achieve an acceptable sales force retention rate. Today salespeople must overcome the now frazzled pace of a hypercompetitive selling environment and splice their time effectively across customers and opportunities. This study introduces the impact that polychronicity—an employee’s preference for switching between multiple tasks within the same block of time—has on job performance and the components of role stress, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Findings demonstrate that a polychronic orientation has a positive impact on performance and a negative impact on role ambiguity. A salesperson’s propensity for scheduling and meeting deadlines reveals similar effects and highlights the desirability of hiring salespeople who are both disciplined and adaptive with their time.

Poverty in consumer culture: towards a transformative social representation

Abstract In this article, we consider the representations of poverty within consumer culture. We focus on four main themes – social exclusion, vulnerability, pleasure and contentment – that capture some of the associations that contemporary understandings have made with poverty. For each theme, we consider the portrayals of poverty from the perspective of key agents (such as marketers, media, politicians) and then relate this to more emic representations of poverty by drawing on a range of contemporary poverty alleviating projects from around the world. We conclude with a set of guidelines for relevant stakeholders to bear in mind when elaborating their representations of poverty. These guidelines may act as a platform to transform marginalising representations of poverty into more empowering representations.

Transforming Poverty-Related Policy with Intersectionality

Despite progress toward poverty alleviation, policy making still lags in thinking about how individuals experience poverty as overlapping sources of disadvantage. Using the lens of intersectionality, this article identifies the gaps that arise from a conventional focus on isolated facets of poverty. Insights generated from an analysis of extant scholarship are used to develop a road map to help policy makers develop programs that address the complex experience of poverty and promote transformative solutions.

The Contextual Value of Social Capital for Subsistence Entrepreneur Mobility

Close-knit relationships are a distinctive facet of subsistence living, in which survival mode entrepreneurship is a way of life. These relationships fuel “bonding social capital” within informal economies as people rely on others to work, consume, and cope with scarce resources. At the same time, policy agendas encourage business growth and social mobility by shifting informal microenterprises into the formal economy. However, success in formalized contexts requires a different form of social capital—that is, “bridging social capital” with people outside ones immediate social network and across institutional structures. Yet policy programs often stop short of addressing how subsistence entrepreneurs manage the inherent tensions across these forms of social capital. As such, this study unpacks the contextual value of social capital using data collected with street vendors in an urban Latin American setting. The analysis identifies four entrepreneurial paths pursued by street vendors and articulates the relative value of bonding and bridging social capital across different economic and social positions. The findings advance insights for a community-centric public policy approach and offer guidance for segmentation and value proposition development within subsistence entrepreneurship programs.

Customer Value Perceptions in Global Business Markets: Exploring the Strategic Potential for Standardization

Using survey data from 800 managers across India, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this study advances the generalizability and strategic potential for understanding customer value perceptions in business markets. Value drivers reveal strong cross-national similarities which challenge recent studies and indicate potential for standardizing value propositions and crafting horizontal segments.